Research shows that children in families who routinely have dinner together do better than those who don\u2019t. They get better grades, do fewer drugs, and are less likely to have an unplanned pregnancy \u2014 or go to jail. That\u2019s great, but it isn\u2019t really what you\u2019d call an action plan. Once you get everyone\u2019s butt in a chair, and you put dinner on the table, then<\/i> what?<\/p>\n
I suppose if you\u2019re Irish, you can sit around telling beguiling stories in lyrical accents, passing them down from one generation to the next. I\u2019m Chinese \u2014 we didn\u2019t do that. My brothers and I dove for the food as soon as my parents shoved it in front of us, and we didn\u2019t come up for air until the last scraps were devoured. Conversation wasn\u2019t a prominent feature of our dinner table.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019m guessing that many of us had parents like mine, who weren\u2019t really interested in what we were doing unless it was something we weren\u2019t supposed to do. That\u2019s why we\u2019re so determined to act differently with our own kids. We want to be the involved, engaged, <\/span>enmeshed<\/span> (oops, strike that) parents that we never had. So naturally, when we sit down to dinner, we ask them questions. <\/span><\/p>\n Sometimes they\u2019re open-ended, as in: \u201cHow was school today?\u201d (Popular answers: \u201cOkay.\u201d \u201cSame as always.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s Saturday.\u201d) Other times, they\u2019re meant to guide and motivate: \u201cDid you do your homework yet?\u201d (\u201cYup.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s not due.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s summer.\u201d)\u00a0 And sometimes, we try to spark meaningful discussion: \u201cWhat do they teach you in that sex ed class, anyway?\u201d (\u201cNothing.\u201d \u201cWhat do you think<\/i>?\u201d \u201cEeeuuuwww!\u201d)<\/span><\/p>\n The problem is that we tend to ask questions that interest us<\/i>. What we should be doing is figuring out what questions interest them<\/i>. <\/span><\/p>\n There\u2019s a family I know who have done exactly that. And rather than the parents always interrogating the kids, they share the asking and the answering equally. Whenever they sit down to dinner, the first three questions are always the same, and everyone takes them on. Gradually, those questions have affected not only their dinner conversations, but the way they look at their lives. Let\u2019s consider them one at a time:<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWhen were you brave today?\u201d<\/b> Like David Copperfield, each of us wonders whether or not we will turn out to be the hero of our own story, and every day we write that story anew. By retelling these small moments of persistence in the face of uncertainty and fear, we reinforce our own grit. That gives us the confidence to do it again. Courage is a muscle: it gets stronger if you use it every day. <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWhen were you kind today?\u201d<\/b> Too often, we treat kindness as a personality trait. We say that one person is kind, and another is not, as if each received a finite ration of kindness at birth. But the truth is, every one of us has the capacity for both kindness and cruelty, and ultimately both are measured in acts, not temperament. If we want a kinder world, then we should shine a light on each other\u2019s acts of kindness whenever we can. <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWhen did you make a mistake?\u201d<\/b> We love our kids\u2019 success. Sometimes we crave it like a drug \u2014 as if it could heal the wounds of our own failures. It can\u2019t. And the more we focus on success, the more we send the message that that is what we value in our kids, and in ourselves. If you really want to succeed, you have to overcome the fear of failure, and the only way to do that is to fail: early, often, and sometimes spectacularly. If you learn to get up afterward and dust yourself off, and use your failure as the launching pad for your next attempt, you\u2019ll go much further than if you hide your mistakes in shame. <\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0Notice that all of these questions work just as well for adults as for kids. Children pay more attention to what we do than what we say. If we can model courage, kindness and resilience for them, they\u2019ll learn more from us than if we just encourage these traits. And often, it will be their stories that end up inspiring and teaching us.<\/span><\/p>\n In the end, the spirit in which we ask these questions is more important than the questions themselves. People thrive in the light of curiosity, like plants beneath the sun, and the leaves that get that light are the ones that grow. We can shine it wherever we want. \u201cWhat filled you with wonder today?\u201d \u201cWhat surprised you?\u201d \u201cWhen were you happy, or angry, or sad?\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n If nothing else, it forces us to decide what\u2019s important \u2014 important enough to examine closely and carefully. Important enough to share. <\/span><\/p>\n Jeff Lee makes his daughters say \u201cEeeuuuwww!\u201d on a regular basis in Seattle<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Engaging kids: Figuring out what questions interest our kids is key.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1162,"featured_media":8008,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dad-next-door","category-parenting"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n